Having just tried to use the Gimp again, I’ve finally realised it’s the kind of poisoned biscuit that a wannabe Nasty Party member might give a beggar to ensure their final hours of starving to death are particularly horrible. It’s as though the Gimp was secretly designed by a manufacturer of closed–source image software, who ensure it’s as irritating and unusable as possible, so driving those who work on images to the pay–for product.

I’m not sure if gimp in slang arises from the software, or the software arises from the slang. Whichever, the word and the program are clearly lovers:

Gimp is a derogatory term for someone disabled, or who has a medical problem that results in physical impairment.

Gimp is an insult implying someone is incompetent, stupid, etc.. It can also be used to imply the person is uncool or can’t / won’t do what everyone else is doing.

To justify my comments, let’s list the errors the Gimp made at me just now in five minutes of attempted image work:

text box delete deletes all but last character; you can’t erase a first mistake and start again;

resize a second time doesn’t: it turns out the Gimp tries to resize from the original size again, rather than resizing from the current smaller size;

layers: computers aren’t paper; that analogy may have worked when people were new to, and unfamiliar with, computers concepts, but the world has spent the last twenty years moving on and perhaps the Gimp ought to notice;

copy one thing, then another, then paste, pastes the first thing, not the second;

move a layer leaves detritus on layer underneath;

it’s sodding difficult to visualise an object as it should appear when used, because the gimp dumps all kind of artefacts on screen when, for example, moving layers around;

resize an image instead keeps the image the same size, but shrinks the original to almost a dot in the middle, and adds huge padding to make up the difference. Specifying an enlargement shouldn’t cause the original image to shrink. If anything, that’s what changing canvas size should be, not image size, were changing canvas size also intended to over change size by a factor of four. Of all the stupid fucking errors this crap software could make, this one takes the biscuit of wretchedness.

As you can probably tell, I’ve really had enough with this miserable, wretched, backwards crap. As much as I dislike Photoshop for introducing many of these wretched design errors that the Gimp carefully copies, Photoshop had less of them, and, of those, most have long since been fixed. Hear that, gimpers, design errors can be repaired; have you thought about doing that? Photoshop is usable. I’m going to have to go learn it.

Adobe has won. The Gimp has driven me to Photoshop. The Gimp is a traitor to Open Source.